Marc Overmars: Arsenal need English spine to achieve Premier League success

It's unlikely that the club's double-winning side of 1998 would have been forced to endure the kind of headlines that Wenger's 2008 vintage has had to swallow over the past seven days.

Marc Overmars was a member of that side, famously scoring the goal that effectively sealed the title for the Gunners at Old Trafford as the season drew to its nail-biting close, and the Dutchman knows only too well the influence that some of the club's legendary personalities had on that twin-success and those that followed.

Overmars, who made a playing comeback for Dutch club Go Ahead Eagles in September, after four years out of the game, still follows the fortunes of a club he describes as "special", but fears that it could be some time before a league title is paraded at The Emirates for the first time.

"Everyone admires the kind of football that Arsenal play but you don't see the club buy players who are already at their peak - the likes of Robinho and (Dimitar) Berbatov," he said. "They're a club who invest in talent - even the likes of Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira were struggling to establish themselves at clubs in Italy before Wenger brought them to Highbury.

"They're still following the same kind of policy but it's now far more difficult to build a side in the way that he (Wenger) did back then. Now it's all about player power. A guy scores a hat-trick on a Saturday and on Monday he's banging on the managers door asking for a contract extension."

Overmars was signed by Wenger in the summer of 1997, having already won the Champions League with Ajax at the age of just 22, but the Dutch winger believes that it was the club's English spine that enabled the likes of himself and Dennis Bergkamp to flourish.

"Every team needs to have its characters - how players are on, and off, the pitch is very important," he said. "At Arsenal we had six or seven English players in the side each week, big players like Tony Adams and Martin Keown and the mix between the homegrown players and the rest worked fantastically well.

"Now the club has gone down an entirely different route. It's not necessarily about age - the Ajax that won the Champions League in 1995 had an average age of 22 - it's about leadership. You need players that are prepared to scrap for every point.

"There's obviously a lot of talent at Arsenal but it takes time for players to develop. Theo Walcott is learning fast - he reminds me of myself in many ways - but he's not the finished article. Everyone wants immediate success but these things take time."

With Arsenal already trailing Chelsea and Liverpool by six points, it's not a commodity that Wenger has on his side.